Bourbon : A History of Kentucky Whiskey

Being a photographer in Kentucky means you are practically guaranteed to photograph two subjects: horses and bourbon. When the editors at Penguin Random House reached out looking for a Louisville photographer to illustrate an upcoming book on the bourbon industry, I couldn’t have been more excited. There’s something about bourbon that’s very romantic. Knowing that most of the processes (whether it be fermentation, distillation, or aging) have not changed in years makes things all the more special. Not to mention, the distilleries, barrels, and even the spirits themselves are downright gorgeous. What resulted was a stunningly beautiful box-set that featured more than one hundred examples of some the best bourbon industry photography available. 

As I learned more about the project, I was delighted to hear that renowned bourbon expert Clay Risen was the book’s author. Clay and I had worked together previously at The New York Times. It was great to be reunited with such a well-respected, renowned wordsmith such as himself. 

Over the course of six months I set out from Louisville and visited nearly two dozen bourbon distilleries on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail to do some bourbon photography. Buffalo Trace, Woodford Reserve, Marker’s Mark, Jim Beam, Willet, Stitzel-Weller, Neeley Family Distillery, and Castle and Key (among  all made the cut, of course. We also visited Vendome Copper Works, Independent Stave Co. and Kelvin Cooperage to produce photography of ancillary companies who are vital to the success of the bourbon industry. The Telegraph Visuals team had the chance to do a little product photography of bourbon bottles and whiskey cocktails from various distilleries as well. 

Many thanks are due to the editors, designers, and creatives on the team at Penguin Random House’s imprint, Ten Speed Press. Check them out!

Here’s an excerpt from the book to wet your appetite:

“Today, bourbon is the most popular, coveted, talked about spirit in America, but not long ago it was a liquor-store wallflower. When I worked in downtown Washington D.C., in the early 2000s, the liquor store around the corner from my office carried A.H. Hirsch Reserve 16-Year-Old, one of the all-time legendary bourbons, for about sixty dollars. Bottles of Willett Family Estate, including near-mythical single-barrel selections such as the Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, sold for about the same. Even Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 23-Year-Old was going for a few hundred dollars. Though “going” is not quite the right word; no one wanted expensive bourbon, so the bottles sat there, gathering dust. 

It sounds glorious. But I also remember how hard it was to find a bar with a decent selection of interesting bourbon, or rye whiskey of any sort. If a few stores were treasure troves, most were deserted islands. Driving around Kentucky, I’d have to return to the same few distilleries open to visitors—not that there were many distilleries, period. As late as 2010, fewer than twenty were operating at any meaningful capacity. So while I get misty-eyed at the memory of those shelves stocked with liquid gold, I also know that today we are experiencing a golden age of American whiskey with better access to a wider variety of great whiskey than ever before. 
All the distilleries in this book make superb whiskey, and most of them did not exist until quite recently. The same goes for the restaurants, hotels, and bars that serve the millions of tourists who visit Kentucky every year. Hulking black rickhouses full of aging whiskey have always been a familiar sight in the central Kentucky landscape. But these days they are as common as horses. Indeed, bourbon has surpassed horse racing as the state’s signature industry. Between 2015 and 2020, sales of American whiskey (of which Kentucky produces about 75 percent) shot from 20.4 million cases to 28.4 million, a 39.6 percent growth rate, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. For super-premium whiskey, the numbers were even more breathtaking, growing from 1.8 million cases to 4.1 million, or about 122 percent. These numbers, impressive as they may be, are just numbers. The real changes are what all those numbers make possible, which can’t be captured on a spreadsheet. Among distillers, there is a renewed passion for innovation, for building on tradition to create new techniques, new flavors, and even entire new styles. The laboratory at Kentucky’s Independent Stave Company, the world’s largest manufacturer of wooden barrels, conducts hundreds of experiments a year to investigate how different types of oak, new methods for charring, and other nascent technologies can bring out novel nuances in the wood—all of which give distillers a vast toolkit for making layered and intriguing new whiskey. ”